Paul Jarvis

34 for 34

2012-04-30T14:09:22Z

I suppose birthdays are a time for reflection, so here is a list of 34 things I’ve learned in my 34 years of (semi) consciousness.

The domain and/or the social media username you want is already taken by someone that isn’t using it properly (or at all), so get over it.
Protein isn’t just found in dead animal bits. You also don’t need to monitor the amount you consume. If you’re eating, you’re getting enough. Focus on other, more important things.
Canada is basically considered a third-world country when it comes to shipping and US-based online retailers. If they do ship to Canada, you can bet your ass you’re paying a huge customs/brokerage fee.
Marriage (to the right person) is super fucking awesome.
“Normal” is how you try and act around people you’re not comfortable with.
“Cool” is what you try to be around people you aren’t comfortable being around.
PayPal is awful, and you will be forced to keep using it indefinitely.
Nuts are funny. Nut milk. Nut sack. My nuts. Warm nuts. Salty nuts.
Gender roles are silly. I bake, I do yoga, I don’t eat meat. And I’m a fucking dude.
Who you know matters.
Stay in shape, otherwise you’ll do something active and pay for it the next day by being really sore.
Success isn’t just about making lots of money but making lots of money never hurt.
If you want to succeed, keep trying, fail, repeat.
Parsley makes your breath fresh! Add it to smoothies.
You can’t win at yoga.
Going for walks relieves stress (bonus points if it’s in nature).
A few small vices are ok in moderation. Like coffee. Or organic + vegan jelly beans.
If you want respect: do what you say you’re going to do.
It’s more important to stand up for yourself than to be thought of as “nice”.
Think before you judge (but try not to judge at all).
Learn from nature and animals.
Looking younger than you are isn’t a bad thing, especially as you get older.
On your deathbed you probably won’t say “I wish I worked more and spent less time doing things I love with people I love”.
Everyone is guru. Yes, even that person you think is a moron. Especially that person.
Oil, vinegar and almond milk can make mayonnaise through the magic of ~~science~~; blending.
Anyone can say they’re an expert. This is both dangerous and interesting.
Nothing is absolute.
You don’t need fancy kitchen gadgets to make good food. Except a good blender, that’s 100% needed.
You don’t need fancy ingredients to make good food either. Just fresh, organic and seasonal produce.
Extreme introversion is ok because the people that matter will understand and the people who won’t understand don’t matter.
Anyone that judges tattoos can suck it. I’m stoked to get old and be covered in tattoos, because I’ll be a fucking awesome old guy with lots of tattoos.
Accept and give compliments.
If it’s sunny and warm, everything but being outside can wait (even if it’s just for a couple minutes).
Listen, then speak. Otherwise you’ll speak stupid.

I’ve probably learned more, but I figured I should stop at 34 or else the whole post title doesn’t work. I’m off to enjoy my birthday by doing a week-long yoga immersion.

An Open Letter to the Planet

2012-04-22T22:19:43Z

Phrases like “save the planet” or “save the environment” don’t make much sense. The planet and the environment were here long before us, and will continue to be here long after us in some form, regardless of what we do or how we shape it. The earth doesn’t need to be saved. what we really mean is that we want to save ourselves and keep the environment tolerable (and even suitable) for us to live in.

We are not separate from nature, regardless of how we’ve built our society or how we sometimes think our lives are disconnected from the planet. We don’t live outside the system; we are part of the system of nature. Every living thing that exists on earth is part of nature – including humans. So nature is no more a resource than slaves were hundreds of years ago. We should not be allowed to own it, to use it recklessly or to treat it without respect. The earth has rights, like all of us, so it deserves fair and just treatment, and should be inhabited in a way that isn’t harmful or detrimental.

As a species, we are now so powerful that nature is an expression of our own consciousness – our wants and our whims. It has adapted to our evolution, and is now as dependent on us as we are on it. When we do wrong by nature, it suffers, and we suffer in the long term.

We can no longer function like this, and we need to completely re-think the design of everything we have and everything we do. Planning, process and function cannot happen in isolation anymore, since nothing in nature is isolated and everything is connected, even humanity. Energy has to be renewable, like the energy that powers all life – the sun. Energy can’t be negatively harvested from the ground, used carelessly and turned into harmful substances and byproducts that hurt and destroy life. Water needs to be clean and healthy – both entering all processes and exiting all processes. It needs to be free and freely available to all. We can take design cues from nature, since nature designs perfectly at all stages, with no excess and no true waste. We need to act and live fairly and justly, not greedily and in a shortsighted way.

That isn’t to say that we cannot and should not use any “natural resources,” because nature doesn’t work like that. Life in nature takes when it needs and only what it needs, and does so in a perfect symphony with all other life around it. Nature creates no negative waste, since any waste it produces is used as substance for other life, creating a circle. Humanity is currently existing out of sync with this circle and has built a straight line – where elements are taken, used, and discarded as waste that is not useful to any organism or to nature as a whole.

We can live better with less if we make things more efficiently, build them to last longer, and create in such a way that it positively affects all other life (instead of doing harm). we have technologies, products and ideas right now to help us. We’re an ingenious species that has evolved to the top of the food chain with our ability to think creatively and develop tools necessary for survival. We now have to harness our inherent abilities to build tools and processes that positively affect all of nature. We can be smarter if we slow down, become wiser with our use of resources, and more far-sighted with every choice we make.

Every government, company, community and individual has the power to change things, right now, without delay, through action. We can vote not just for elected officials, but also with our wallets and our consumption, as consumers, for products and companies that are aligned with making things better. this does not mean sacrifice, just better choices.

We know that changes need to be made, and we need to apply this awareness to do something. We can get involved and use each of our unique and individual abilities to spark this change. We can use our intellects and wisdom as a globally unifying force to create positive changes for the environment.

Diversify

2012-04-18T00:04:38Z

Something that’s come up a lot lately in my life is watching people “lose their shit” when something in their work life doesn’t go the way they hoped or thought it would. Whether it’s a boss/leader falling from grace for reasons of humanity or even just an industry changing focus due to consumer demand.

Your job is important, but you are not your job.

You also not your hobby, your faith or your convictions. Those things are greatly important and meaningful — but a single one of them shouldn’t solely define who you are. Make the definition of you take at least a paragraph to describe or explain, and then drag it to the trash, since words cannot encompass everything that you are.

The saying “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” holds weight (even if you’re vegan and don’t eat eggs). If your life is based on a single thing (even if that one thing is awesome), you run the risk horribly damaging yourself if it fails, changes or goes away.

Have a basket for every egg. That way if one thing doesn’t work out, you’ve still got enough eggs to do whatever you want to do with them. Say, letting them hatch into awesome little chickens that live full and diverse lives.

How to win at Instagram

2012-04-13T16:55:22Z

For those of you who don’t use the internet (I assume that can’t be many of my readers), you may not have heard of Instagram. It’s a social media photo sharing app for iPhones (and now android devices!) that lets you post pictures and like or comment on other people’s pictures with filters that make you look like a better photographer than you really are. Here are some things I’ve learned so far —

It’s not tumblr

If your photo stream is all photos from other people or sources or just “reblogs” of photos you like, it won’t be that interesting to others. It does, however, work great for sharing original (i.e. your) content.

Be real

The beauty of IG (which is what people in “the know” call it) is that you can share unpolished or behind-the-scenes access to what you’re doing, especially if you’re a company or larger brand. Use your corporate website to show professionally edited photos of your products or yourself. Use Instagram to show that you’re an real human being.

Interact

This goes for any social media site/service. If you’re using to talk at your customers, you’re not going to get much out of it. So answer questions on your photos, like and comment on other people’s photos and follow people you find interesting back.

Pace yourself

I know you’re excited about whatever you’re taking photos of, but you don’t need to post 30 photos of pretty much the same thing all in row, within a couple of minutes. Take the photos then post your favourite shot. That’ll also net more likes per photo (if that’s your aim, you narcissist!).

Use other services

It’s hard to type long comments on your phone, so if you’re on your computer use services like copygr.am or statigr.am to like, comment, reply and search on Instagram — right from your computer.

Don’t be 100% the same, 100% of the time

It gets boring quickly if you only post shots of a single thing or idea. Take my photo stream — it’s most photos of creature-free food I make, but I also post a lot of silly photos of myself, nature shots from where I live and travel photos. They definitely don’t get as many likes as the food photos, but they keep things less monotonous for both myself (so I stay interested in using Instagram) and my followers.

You can’t win at instagram

As with any social media service, there’s really no right way to use it. Use it however you want or however you find value from it. These are just a few tips i’ve learned along the way.

Eat Awesome

2012-04-13T16:50:09Z

I just finished writing a book, Eat Awesome: a regular person’s guide to plant-based, whole foods. It includes practical pantry-stocking tips, kitchen-hacking tricks, and most importantly, over 30 nourishing recipes and meal ideas. No dogma, just deliciousness. Veganism is love, baby!

Five reasons to shell out 5 bucks for this bundle of recipes, meal ideas & foodspiration.

It’s practical. This ebook is packed with useful, easy-to-understand information on plant-based cooking. It’s not a science textbook; it’s more like a conversation with a guy who really loves food.
It’s only 5 bucks. You could buy a frou-frou nut milk latte with cinnamon fairy dust — or this ebook. In fact, buy both and enjoy them at the same time!
It’s pretty. You’ll find gorgeous, full-screen photos for every recipe in the ebook. And I know you love high-styling veggie visuals.
It’s friendly. This ebook won’t shame you into cooking or eating differently. It will show you new ideas, interesting meals, and encourage you to play with your food. No dogma, just deliciousness.
It’s got nut jokes. Lots of them (and there’s a whole section on using a nut sack). Nuts are funny. Don’t pretend they’re not.

It doesn’t matter if you call yourself vegan, raw, “Captain Stupendo” or Mom. You are what you eat — so why not eat awesome?

buy

Reasons why men should do yoga

2012-04-30T15:16:04Z

I’m sick of reading articles on why men should do yoga, since they invariably mention “it’s a great place to pick up women!”. Your intention shapes your practice, so if your intention is vapid philandering with the opposite (or even the same) sex — enlightenment is more than just a few peak poses away.

No yoga studio I’ve ever practiced at also had speed-dating between vinyasa classes or a cocktail bar with crappy house music blaring in the corner for post-asana drinks. So it really doesn’t need to be promoted as the next best pickup spot.

All the reasons I have for men to do yoga are the same as the reasons women should. Just do yoga because you want to or because it makes you feel good. Don’t worry about shallow or even more enlightened reasons. They’ll show themselves, or not, either way it’s a pretty neat process.

If your goal is to get more men to do yoga — the reasons don’t need to be dumbed down for “undiscerning brutes”. Some of us are smarter than that. And those who aren’t shouldn’t be catered to.

The promise of future work

2012-04-13T16:30:54Z

A lot of times people contact me for new web design/development work, and offer the potential of work down the road or multiple projects, in lieu of full payment. While I think it’s a great idea to work with the same client multiple times and develop a relationship – that’s how I enter every project, so this shouldn’t be factor in the price. At least half of my clients are “repeat offenders”, and I am extremely stoked to work with these amazing people more than once.

It’s unclear to me why a discount should be provided when “future work” is dangled like a carrot. I can’t walk into an electronics store and tell them I’ll buy my next television in 4-5 years from them, so please give me a huge discount now. Or walk into a bar and ask for a percentage off my tab because I am sure I’ll have more than one pint.

A better course of action (and one that I follow) is that I charge less to clients I’ve worked with before, since there’s no sales cycle and I know exactly what to expect from start to finish.

Growth

2012-04-13T16:23:44Z

Since I am often very busy and booked fairly far in advance, I get the inevitable question “why don’t you hire more people?”. I’ve been asked this for 10+ years, and my answers have always stayed the same… I figured I’d share them here.

Roles

My current role is doing everything, although I try to keep sales, managing, administration and supervising to an absolute minimum. Since I’d rather be doing things like designing and programming, I can more easily focus on those two things because my company is just me. I do hire sub-contractors sometimes for brand development and illustration, but I only hire people I trust and don’t need to oversee or even check in with them. I have been the creative director of a larger team/staff before and while there are some folks who excel at managing others, I know that’s not a strength or interest of mine. I’d rather be a doer than a supervisor, so I stick with that.

Purpose

My goal has never been to have the most clients, or even to make the most money. I like being focused on just a couple of clients at a time, and a few interesting projects a year. Growth would go against my core reason for doing what I do. My measure of success is doing good work for interesting people. The amount of projects or size of budgets isn’t a factor.

Lifestyle

For me, this is huge — and something I’ve struggled with since I started my company over a decade ago. The risk of burnout and stress can definitely increase with more responsibility. Knowing you are responsible for the pay cheque of others, or many more clients/projects at the same time, or clients with much larger budgets on the table. I like my work because I can (for the most part) tuck it away and leave it when I need to. I don’t work weekends (too often), I take days off during the week when schedules allow (and I make sure they do most of the time), and typically take at least 10 weeks off a year (which I think is more than average in North America for solopreneurs). If I didn’t carve time away from work, I wouldn’t be as effective in my work. If I had more moving pieces to deal with, in a larger team, I might not be able to balance the lifestyle I want with the work I’d have to do and the responsibilities I’d have.

Income

As I mentioned above, making the most money has never been the main focus or goal. But, obviously making money is extremely important. Thankfully (very thankfully) I’m at a place where I can set a rate I want and have clients that are more than willing to pay it. If I had a team, I’d have to build in the cost of managing, supervision and extended business services (like bookkeeping, accounting, admin, legal, etc). So, to make the same amount I’d have to charge much more, which I might not be able to do, while keeping my own salary where it’s at.

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I’m in no way an advocate of “smaller is better” nor am I anti-big business. I just know for me personally, this is why I have never been interested in growing my company past just being me.

Dealing with unreasonable requests

2012-04-13T16:26:32Z

Chances are you’ve been there — a client (or potential client) asks you something that’s just not possible in terms of time or budget. Just yesterday I got an email asking me if I was able to do a project that I calculated out to be less than minimum wage in British Columbia if I took it on.

So how, as professionals, do we deal with unreasonable requests?

Obviously most people’s gut reactions is to give the equivalent of the middle finger via email. I know that’s how I feel sometimes (but thankfully email lets you think about things first, then email later…). It’s an amateur response to a bad situation, and as professionals, we can be better than slinging insults.

Does the person understand what’s involved?

If they don’t, then maybe it’s best to write a quick response as to what would be involved in the task, and therefore explain why it’s not a reasonable request. And then, simply leave it at.

If they do understand, what are their motives?

If there is an unreasonable deadline for them, that could be why they’re asking for an absurd deadline for you. And again, it’s easy to explain that you can’t (or won’t) work like that. Then you can possibly propose an alternate or scaled down solution. I doubt anyone’s motives are to insult when asking someone else to do work, so try and think past being insulted (or feel that way for a bit to get it out of your system, and then respond).

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Our society moves quickly, and sometimes at an unreasonable rate. It’s also too easy to quickly lash back online, as is evident on any website with comments, social media site, message board, or any email exchange gone wrong. Personally, I’ve been guilty myself of that from time to time. I have, however, made a conscious effort lately to be more educational than insulting in these situations, and the majority of the time it’s resulted in updated (to be reasonable) expectations instead (which is really best result) hopefully getting paid what you want and doing the work in the time it actually takes to do it properly.

How to get an accurate quote for your next web project

2012-04-13T16:09:17Z

The first question I am invariably asked when someone wants to work with me is “what do you charge for websites?”. I unfortunately always need to answer with “it depends”. To avoid this initial volley with any web designer or web design company, here is a list of 7 key points you can prepare when you’re thinking about having your website designed (or redesigned).

Budget

Although you might not know how much it’d cost to do your website, since that’s not a service you provide, you might have a budget you need to stick too. It sets up parameters for the scope of features the site could have, and also determines how feasible the project is with a web designer. Your upper limit for the project might be below the lower limit of a web designer. In which case, it’s best to know this right away so as not to waste either persons time.

Current site

If you’re looking for a redesign, your current site, is a perfect starting point (even if you hate it). List out what you’d like to keep in terms of how it functions and what is going away or changing.

Goals

In a sentence, what are you trying to accomplish with the project? How will success be measured? This will hopefully lead the web designer to some ideas on how to reach your goals, possibly in ways you’ve not thought of.

Functionality

Not all pages on a website are created equal. Some require a lot more work, both in terms of design and in terms of programming setup. For example, an about page requires nothing but content and photos, whereas a shopping cart page could require a complex program to make it work. A web designer needs to know, in great detail, how your site will function. This can take the form of a plain english list or even a reference to a site that has the functionality you’re looking for. Some examples of common functionality are: e-commerce (anything from a PayPal button to a custom e-commerce application that processes credit cards and deposits into your merchant account), mailing list (setup and template design), flash animations, user login and private access, forms that save to databases, and/or simply displaying content from a database or CMS in a unique way. It’s not enough to list what you’d like (similar to the list above), you’ve also got to be clear as to how want each function to work.

Templates

A template is a unique page, that’s different in the way it displays content (and not just different in terms of the content it’s got). Most websites have a homepage that’s laid out differently than other pages on the site, so that’d be a unique template. If your website needs e-commerce, then there will be templates for individual products, a shopping cart, a checkout, and more. This is important to know, since every template needs to be designed and programmed.

Overall aesthetic

Giving a general idea (with examples) of what you’re looking for in terms of the style of the site is important because it might not be a style the web designer is comfortable with (or excited to do).

Everything else

While the above points are required, the following are good to know points to move towards accuracy in a quote:

what’s the timeline? when does the project need to start? when does it need to finish?
do you need logo/brand design as well (if yes, this opens up a lot more questions)?
who is the competition and what do you like/dislike about them (a list of 5-10 with URL)
what sites do you like the look of, and why (a list of 5-10 URL with notes)
the technical details of your current web host (operating system, software versions, space/bandwidth – this can be the URL of your current hosting package or the contact information to the host with your account name for reference)

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Since no website is the same, no website will cost the exact same amount. If you provide details for each of the 7 points above, then a potential web designer should be able to give a much more accurate quote than if you just asked them “what do you charge for websites?”.